smattiso

I'm buying long dated puts on Apple personally. Here is my investment thesis:

In a nutshell my belief is that Apple will have a few quarters of declining revenue and that is going to torpedo their market cap.

* Apple is 100% reliant on selling new hardware, whatever push into subscriptions they are trying to do is going to fail or take ages to catch on. The reason for this is that Apple sells primarily to consumers, so the subscription needs to be a consumer subscription. What could that be? $30 a month for Apple Music + Apple TV + Apple Fitness + Apple Photo Storage? I suppose this is possible but I don't see people switching away from Netflix, HBO, or Spotify so easily. Spotify is likely the most at risk. This strategy is possible but I think the timeframe is going to take longer than people expect.

* We are close to reaching the end of phone innovation. The things on the horizon that could possibly drive continued revenue are: smaller iPhones, folding iPhones, planned obsolescence, and from the software side a merge of iOS/iPad OS such that you can use your iPhone 15sMAX-SE with a USB-c monitor as your computer. This is possible but say in 2021 apple releases a 4" folding to 8" iPhone with USB-C out to an external monitor that would fly off the shelves. However that is basically the logical end-point of smartphones and after that Apple is going to have a hard time selling anything new until AR glasses arrive.

In a nutshell Apple needs a subscription model to sustain this valuation, and without obsolescence essentially being a forced subscription (you rent your 1000 iphone for 4 years and then chuck it as worthless) I'm not sure they will find success.

The planned obsolescence thing is a real revenue driver for Apple though and without some antitrust lawsuit maybe they can maintain that for a long time. My bet is that 2 quarters from now they miss earnings and the valuation blows up.

No problem with that. The problem I have is with selling people bullshit golden promises of wealth when that is mathematically impossible given the cap table. Just don't even offer equity at all at that point so employees aren't deluded.

At this point I know what I'm doing enough to not get burnt by these types of scams, and when I was an engineer I was lucky to basically work for FAANGs the whole time where they are very charitable to employees. But when I was 23 I didn't have the knowledge to evaluate pre-ipo equity and some startups prey on this information imbalance to delude people.

The problem is that some people need money and can't say no. That's why anybody works for minimum wage...

The executives and investors and FAANG engineers have all made good money and seen decent RSU terms, you can't pull the wool over their eyes. Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" (There are ten trillion in the option pool).

I think engineers would do well to know that you are a COST CENTER to the business and the people who run it. They need you to make their product so they can make money but they hire you begrudgingly. You are in their power and they want to take advantage of you by paying you the least they can (shady options awards) and working you as much as possible (why did you slip on this feature you story pointed!!!).

Put yourselves in their shoes and you would do the same. Starting a successful business is all about customer growth and making money. If you aren't directly responsible for a part of that then you are a cost. Make sure you are getting paid what you are worth because nothing in this world gets built without great engineers, but the system is run by people who want to have power over you. Be careful.

I've been there. My personal take is that the day in and day out life of a coder sucks, big time. Humans weren't designed for it. If you are inventing something novel and new and actually 'engineering' then that's different, but pulling the next React feature from some PM's backlog, that's hell.

Look at your cohort, I would venture it's mostly 20 somethings men. Maybe the odd older guy but certainly not a diverse set of people. It's a young man's game because the burn out is real and for most people coding is just an unsustainable profession. Come to grips with the fact that maybe it is unsustainable for you.

It's a lot less tedious and easier in many regards working as an engineering manager. Or a product manager. Or something entirely different. Coding as a career isn't for everybody (wasn't for me). YMMV. If it isn't for you figure out how to change it, it might not be easy but it is probably worth it.

Source: ex-FAANG SDE.

Why did you set this goal? Could you have picked any random 30 year goal and been as happy or was this something that naturally spoke to you? Are you still excited by it?

I mostly agree with what you have to you say. Clearly you have been through this and have gained a lot of wisdom along the way. We are all products of our environments and our goals arise from this. People who grow up in the Bay Area, or who read Hacker News, or who excel at STEM have "life goals" of running a startup. Some actually want that internally and others are just going through the motions. The latter will be miserable. It's also not something you can tough out and force on yourself. Either you want it or you don't, and that's a good thing! We are individuals after all.

Where I disagree is that depression is caused by us being misaligned internally. Anybody who has been there knows that the brain can hijack your perception of the world. When you are depressed everything sucks. We live in an unexplainable universe with billions of assholes and we are all going to die so what's the point of anything? Nihilism takes over. You get more depressed. But once the fog lifts you can find the joy in life and appreciate all the stuff your "rational" depressed self thought was pointless.

From my experience I think its best to not make these grand sweeping life goals in the first place. Take it day by and keep moving forward. What excites you today? What do you daydream about when you are in the shower? People who achieve these "great goals" do so via naturally gained momentum and almost nobody has a life goal that lasts for decades. You start with something, see if you like it, if you do keep that momentum rolling. It should be more natural, feel good, and not be contrived. Be easy on yourself and enjoy the ride. You don't have to be Steve Jobs and even he wasn't trying to be Steve Jobs. He just got the momentum going and kept with it. If it happens so be it but if you are miserable you are doing it wrong.

I think 'crap job' can be multifaceted. For instance take someone making a million a year at a hedge fund with a strategy of frontrunning public pension fund trades. To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life. It depends on the individual. Some hate the Army, and some sign up to do 4 tours. You have to find your own purpose and your own way of staying motivated.

I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.

Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.

Source: Worked at 3 different FAANGs for nearly 10 years.

What you are describing exists in almost every big company. I assume that you are working on a mature product with a big code base. In these projects the pace of development is slow and the changes are typically small and incremental. Engineers tend to get burnt out as building anything requires an egregious amount of back and forth with PMs, TPMs, QE, etc. As a result probably 90% of the engineers are not motivated to build anything instead optimize for reaching the next level (L5 L6 etc) and payday.

I came to the same conclusion as you and ended up quitting. However if you want to stay there is another path.

Like I said 90% of the people you are working with are burnt out and their work is boring, but 10% are legit engineers building the future. They might not be working on your team, or your product, or even your org, but they are there. If you can collaborate with these people you will find your work 1000x more enjoyable and these are the type of people who will go on to do great things. You can be one of them and this will carry you on to bigger and better things as your career goes on.

First you need to prove yourself to your own team as someone who can get things done and isn't a wimp. This can take as little as a few months. After that look around your own product and org for something that you would be totally stoked to work on. Maybe this is an inventive product idea you came up with, maybe its something a secret team is building, who knows? Start reaching out to your manager and people on that project and offer your services. Start small build an integration with some other product, fix a few bugs, etc. Be nosy into what is happening within your company, stay upbeat, and be willing to step in and be the man. If you have that attitude and can keep your passion going you can get to those rare higher levels of the engineering profession. If you check out of your job and stay depressed you can make a living for a while but you will stay where you are. It is what you make of it, and if your company or your manager won't let you progress in the way you want, you can always quit. Don't stick around for years doing the same old BS, and don't let your career be controlled by your manager, but there is another way. That being said if you are young and a new grad it will be much more difficult until you have proven yourself over a few years.

For me it's about stopping me from myself. Willpower is nice but not giving yourself the chance is even better. A drug addict with willpower can keep some coke and not use it, but it's better to not have it in the first place.

To that end, the biggest single thing I have done is to remove the web browser and all entertainment apps from my phone. That has done wonders for me and my ADD. I never reach for my phone unless someone calls/texts me or I need to accomplish a task. Try it out for a month I doubt you will want to go back. My mind definitely has improved as a result.

I also put my laptop away in a drawer when I am not using it.

I disagree. Humans are creatures of habit and environment definitely plays into that. Change the environment and you change the habits.

Take someone from the Midwest suburbs where they have to drive everywhere and move them to NYC. Instantly they will be getting their 10k steps with no problem.

Get rid of all the junk food in your house, 95% of your eating problems just went away.

This phone was like that for me (maybe not for you!). I was seriously addicted to the Internet, like seriously browse HN and reddit for a couple hours a day everyday. Youtube maybe a couple more. Now unless I'm working or streaming a movie I rarely even open my laptop and it just sits in a cupboard. My life has drastically improved after working to rid myself of Internet addition. It's a serious problem for many people. Getting a phone where I could remove the Web from it completely was a huge part of that.

I don't think I'm getting security updates but frankly I haven't checked. I'm not able to open web pages with my version so I think my risk is pretty minimal aside from some exploitable silent SMS or Gmail bug.

The phone works for me, and I did a HUGE amount of research into my options before buying. The Jelly 2 which I was previously unaware of looks to be pretty slick, but for 60 bucks off ebay I don't think you can go wrong. YMMV

Don't be, you run it through a debloat script and it kills 99% of all that junk. I posted in a top level comment.

"- Like most (all?) Android phones, you cannot uninstall a bunch of the useless shovelware it comes with, like Google Play Movies."

I thought this as well, but you are wrong.

adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 $PACKAGE_NAME

Except you can't call an uber or listen to spotify with this.

I have been using this as my daily minimalist phone for over 4 months. I love it, with some caveats.

I bought it for a few reasons:

* Tired of lugging around a monsterous phone.

* Not allowing my Internet/web addiction to follow me everywhere.

* Wanted something small and waterproof for outdoor water sports emergencies.

I bought mine (an original Verizon edition) on ebay for 60 dollars. After that you will want to run it through some debloat scripts which improves battery and declutters the phone. Root it if you like, although I did not as I am satisfied with the mods you can make without root. https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/development/release...

I have purposefully crippled the phone and removed Google Chrome, Youtube, as well as the Play Store.

Basically adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.____

I personally ripped out the Play Store so that I couldn't be tempted to download Chrome/YouTube again. I downloaded every app I thought I would want and now I sideload new apps with adb if I find other use cases.

I have considered the alternative use case of sideloading the store, downloading the new app, updating my existing apps, and then removing the store. However given the continuous obsolescence that occurs with phones, my plan is to only update things as they break rather than constantly pushing myself to the newest versions until eventually my phone becomes clunky and unusable.

The phone does everything I want (Uber, Maps, phone, text, whatever!) and I have 0 access to the web. I love it. You can't do this on an iPhone, I tried many times and the closest is with parental locking but it doesn't work how you'd like.

The downside is that the battery life kind of sucks, however I get a full day of use out of it. I plug it in every night, I plug it in my car when I'm driving and use Android Auto, and without the Web to distract me I only use it for calls, texts, note taking, and to briefly look up maps, kitesurfing forecasts, or to call an uber.

I can't wait for the exact same form factor with a 2x bigger battery. I'll never go back to a mega phone for daily use.

Happy to answer more questions.

How long until Seattle drops?

Dude, (Dudette?) your thoughts are very similar to mine. The world is a big place with a lot of possibilities and this is totally possible. DM me.

So what if it was Ebola? Should we still allow air travel? Cruise ships? etc. People will self regulate to a certain extent but the idea that we kill a bunch of people so we can engage in more or less meaningful activities is pretty dumb.

What lives are being ruined exactly? Some accountant for GrubHub who misses his paycheck? People still have food lodging etc, it just sucks that our "economy" is dependent on 100% of the working age people working 100% of the time otherwise ... collapse? Let's save the lives we can and keep the lights on. Society will be fine.

Why don't you believe that to be true? There are a myriad of ways for a combustion powered helicopter to fail. Just look at how many billionaires have been killed in helicopter flights.

Electric motors do not fail as often as combustion engines. Most eVTOL designs have redundancies that don't exist in a normal helicopter. I have flown R22s a handful of times and there were many times where an engine failure would have been disastrous.

The likelihood of failure is much lower with an eVTOL than a conventional helicopter. Additionally a BRS chute could work with eVTOLs in a way it couldn't with a normal heli.

Exactly my point. Curing cancer is a more noble pursuit and a hell of a lot harder work and higher skilled than javascript programming. Somehow we programmers think knowing how to reverse a linkedlist and get hired by a FAANG automatically puts us in the upper echelons of engineers. Just because you make a lot of money in software doesn't mean you know how to actually build things that help people.

How is that condescending? sub "frontend for Google AdWords" with "plumber, truck driver, etc." Not everybody has the skills, motivation, luck, to be working on problems that push the human race forward. So what? People should still be content. I would argue that we programmers are some of the most delusional about what our jobs really accomplish, and who they really help. The person making 500k at Twitter thinks they have the skills to make the world a better place, but do they? Probably not. And who cares?

So you are moving society forward? Your banal motivations of lifting heavy things and having sex with random women is noble? Says who? You exploit software so that other people can steal, spy, etc. and I would argue that your life is even more purposeless than that of the hedonist. Unless you are building something useful or performing needed services to improve human life who cares? The truth is that everybody is mostly a drag on society.

Previous generations set society up in a way that today it's not really necessary to work super hard. That's what we have been striving for as a civilization since the beginning. Free time to spend with our families and friends.

Without religion, nationalism, war, status"ing", etc, people have woken up and realized that life IS meaningless. If you don't have to struggle to survive, many will lapse into a state of torpor because why not?

Look how many people quit their jobs to travel around in a van and rock climb? That's basically the same as the video game player, but so what?

I believe people should be using their time and abilities to take care of themselves and their families, experience love and joy, and to hopefully leave the world a better place (at least not a worse place). There is still a lot of work to do (cure cancer, explore space, clean up our planet, build homes for people, maintain what we have) and ideally people will be motivated to work on these problems, but to do so just so you can have more sex is ridiculous. In the future people won't be exploring the universe Star Trek style just so they can have a baller pad in Miami and bang "10s".

I agree building a company just for the sake of building a company is as arbitrary and meaningless of an Ithaca as it is to want to work for say Google. However contributing in a meaningful way to improving the world is a noble pursuit and we need more people doing that not less. Whether we are already at max-capacity of useful contributing people is another question. Maybe the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn't have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family.

Everybody has to find their own path I guess. Also 99.99% of people don't care about improving the world and the world gets by just fine on its own. Or does it (global warming, war, etc.)? Who knows, who cares.

I'm actually more interested in the science, however from what I've seen that's usually reserved for PhD Oceanographers? How do I get in contact with you?

I've often considered going back to school for a MS in Robotics, but I wonder if it's possible to join an outfit like yours as a SW guy and "pick up" some of the prereq knowledge on the job? I'd probably stay more on the software side (state estimation, control theory, route planning, sensor fusion etc).

If you are open to talking more over the phone or email or something I'd definitely appreciate it as I have wanted to break in to this field for a very long time and having some guidance on the actual ins and outs of the industry would be a great help.

I know of WHOI and Scripps, who are the other big players in the scientific realm? I know Paul Allen did some exploratory stuff (not sure about r&d) and Ray Dalio with OceanX is doing something.